Visibility.
Once upon a time, that word was the most common answer I heard when I asked marketing leaders what was wrong with their content operations. “We have limited visibility into what content is planned and produced and how effective it is,” they’d say.
One CMO of a Fortune 1000 company even admitted she learned about the company’s thought leadership by subscribing to the newsletter. “I have no idea what they’re planning,” she said.
Over the last two years, that word has faded.
Generative AI stormed into our vocabularies, commoditizing content creation. Speed and quantity are the new watchwords, and senior leaders seem to have resigned themselves to content wastage as the cost of doing business.
“Visibility? Meh. Why worry about it when we’re producing so quickly? What’s the worst that can happen? It won’t get used?”
Well, yes. And that’s precisely the problem. I talk about it and the solutions in this video. Keep reading for even more detail.
The same logic has been applied to digital ad spend. Despite estimates that 22% of all ad budgets are lost to fraud, only 23% of marketing leaders in a 2023 survey described fraud as a concern, with 14% saying they were “unconcerned.”
Now, we’re sleepwalking into the same room with content strategy — or, more precisely, the lack of one. Forrester estimates that 65% of customer-oriented content goes unused due to issues with findability, relevance, or quality.
Let’s do some quick math: If marketers recovered even half of that wasted content, do you think overall marketing results might improve?
The messy content machine
Consider how raw ideas become marketing messages, thought leadership, articles, and campaigns. That process — now supercharged (or muddled) by generative AI — usually starts with someone creating or curating the “right” inputs to feed the content machine.
Leaders may establish the themes, but those soon get distorted by siloed teams using tools that promise efficiency but deliver chaos.
Here’s the irony: AI was supposed to make this easier.
Spoiler: It doesn’t.
AI amplifies the mess. Ideas are invisible until they’re transformed into content. And without visibility, businesses fall into the same trap: Content is everybody’s job but nobody’s strategy.
Frontline teams use AI to pump out hyper-specific content for immediate needs. Meanwhile, central teams struggle to manage the tidal wave of content or hesitate to trust it all — because they have no visibility into what was generated by AI versus what was crafted by humans.
Imagine running an automobile assembly line. The average car has 30,000 parts assembled along a line about 1,000 feet long.
Now, imagine you only have visibility into the last 50 feet. You’d have no idea how many cars are coming, which models, and whether someone swapped out a key part.
That’s what many organizations’ content operations look like today: no visibility, no alignment, and no control.
The fear factor in content collaboration
At the heart of this visibility crisis lies a deeper, often overlooked issue: a fear of collaboration.
I’ve noticed this fear growing over the last few years — especially in environments where production speed is the priority. Collaboration is often perceived as a bottleneck, requiring more time for multiple voices to be heard, consensus to be built, and conflicts to be resolved. Put simply: The focus shifted from “crafting with intention” to “publishing for the sake of speed.”
AI has only added to this challenge, amplifying the tension between speed and meaningful collaboration. Let’s unpack this further:
Fear of losing control (to the machine)
A global enterprise I worked with has been trying to use AI to churn out massive quantities of SEO-oriented content. But regional teams often find it tone-deaf and irrelevant. Leadership resists collaborating with regional teams to improve relevance, fearing it would “pollute” the AI’s training data or slow production. The result? AI content that’s fast but increasingly ineffective.
Fear of too much process
At one SaaS company, the CEO proudly claimed, “GenAI will replace midlevel employees soon.” They’ve implemented AI tools for everything — content creation, analytics, publishing schedules, etc. But without a collaborative framework, the tools have become distractions. Teams generate more content, but it lacks strategic alignment. The result? Algorithmic clutter.
(This situation reminds me of actor and director Ben Affleck’s comment about AI and art: “AI is a craftsman at best … craftsman is knowing how to work. Art is knowing when to stop.”)
Fear of failure (in the AI spotlight)
I know of a midsize consultancy that has deployed AI tools to centralize content marketing creation. But I also know that individual practitioners fear that the shared system will expose their work as less polished. So they’ve tried to use their own models. Instead of fostering collaboration, AI reinforced silos. The result? Missed opportunities and a more complicated case for future AI investments.
Generative AI will perform much better in environments with precise inputs, processes, and collaboration.
Logistics offers a perfect analogy: AI optimizes supply chains when it has complete visibility into raw materials, production stages, and delivery timelines. Your content “supply chain” is no different.
Embrace the AI-powered mess
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: AI doesn’t eliminate our content mess — it amplifies it.
Regional teams will still create their own content. Subject-matter experts will still upload slide decks that don’t align with strategy. AI will still generate headlines that sound right but miss the point.
And that’s OK — as long as there’s a mechanism to make the mess visible to the humans who need to make the content mean something.
Think of your content strategy and the visibility it provides as air traffic control. You don’t dictate every takeoff or landing. But you do need to know what’s in the air, what’s ready to launch, and what’s grounded.
Generative AI isn’t going away — it’s only becoming more central to content creation. The first step to thriving in this new era is reclaiming visibility.
Here’s how to start:
- Map your content supply chain: Identify every stage of content creation, including where AI contributes.
- Test and choose collaborative tools: Prioritize tools that enhance visibility and teamwork, not just automation.
- Build a culture of partnership: Embrace AI as a tool that works with the individuals on your team and their role in the process, not in place of them.
- Slow down to speed up: Sometimes, the most effective way forward is to pause, reflect, and create intentional friction in your content process. This pause isn’t about delaying progress — it’s about ensuring sharper focus, fostering creativity, and making decisions that lead to impactful, sustainable momentum.
It’s your story. AI can help you tell it — but it still needs you (and a strategy) to guide it.
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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute